Hummingbird Read online

  ‘Well, well,’ my father said eventually. ‘Isn’t that something?’

  To begin with I said nothing. I only looked at the water, which I hadn’t seen for so long. I’m not sure what I believed back then (I’m not sure what I believe now) but whenever I thought of what might be beyond death and dying I would think of this light, playing on this water.

  ‘It sure is,’ I said.

  About a month later Lamar Spiller’s boat arrived. Or at least some of it did. The front half arrived on a Monday afternoon; the back half didn’t get in until the Wednesday. They came on trucks, which bumped their way down the narrow logging road with their hazard lights flashing and their wide load signs scraping against the new leaves of the poplars. It was a big boat, bigger than anything they used on the lakes around here. They’d had to cut it in half to move it.

  Lamar Spiller was rich. He hadn’t always been. As a younger man he’d worked as a fishing guide and lived in his father’s old summer camp. Over the years he’d probably tied about a million jigs onto a million lines, but one day he’d held one in his hand and had the idea of fixing a small silver propeller onto it. It had worked. Or, more importantly, the fisherman he guided believed it worked (in so many ways fishing tackle, as much as fishing itself, is a parable of faith). Lamar had had the good sense to patent it. He’d called it the Butterfly Jig and within no time at all he’d made a lot of money. And like many men who come by money late and unexpectedly he’d ended up simply enlarging the dimensions of the life he already had. He added a second floor to his father’s old cabin. He got a bigger truck. He bought as many acres around the cabin as he could and named it Butterfly Creek Estate. Always a private man, he surrounded it with no trespassing signs. But they weren’t aggressive, as those signs often are. They were more apologetic somehow. Please don’t bother me, they seemed to say. I just want to be left alone. And that, for the most part, was how we’d always left him.

  But the arrival of the boat was too much to resist. A couple of hundred yards up the tracks there was a culvert surrounded by tall cattails, from where you could see directly into Lamar’s yard without being seen yourself. When I went there I found the two halves of the boat sitting on the grass. It looked as if it’d fallen from the sky and split apart, or else been disastrously beached by the swiftly receding waters of a flood, like the Ark on Ararat. But it wasn’t an ark, and it wasn’t from the bible. Afterwards, I would discover it was a Cape Islander from Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia.

  A few days later I walked down to the culvert after school and found the boat had been put back together. The next morning some men turned up from town and launched it into the creek that ran through Lamar’s property – the creek he’d called Butterfly. It was barely wide enough for the boat to fit and was so shallow they only just managed to get it into the water before its keel got good and stuck in the mud and goose shit. It was never going to move an inch after that, which didn’t seem to bother Lamar one bit. I could see him standing on the bank, pointing shyly to the men to direct them and nodding his head, smiling and then remembering not to smile. I don’t think he’d meant it to actually go anywhere. Why would he? He hardly ever went anywhere himself.

  After the men left I watched him climb onto the deck and check through the cabin as though one of them might have tried to stow themselves away in there for some reason. Then he came out and sat on the stern, looking down at the reeds on the banks, some of which were still flat and crumpled from the vanished weight of the snow. From my spot by the culvert it looked as though an insect had landed on his forehead. He had furzy grey eyebrows that were hardly ever still. They started moving whenever he was talking or eating; sometimes they started moving when he was just thinking. Right then he was probably thinking pretty hard about something. They were darting around like dragonflies.

  The boat must have appeared odd out there on the creek, I thought, surrounded by the reeds and willows and tamaracks, the forest crowding in on all sides of it; an ocean boat, a long ways from any ocean. Or at least I imagined it must have. I’d only ever seen oceans in drawings and photographs. I’d always pictured them as wide and open and endless and for about a week I went every afternoon to look at Lamar’s boat and think about oceans. Sometimes I’d sit and look at it for so long my face would puff up from all the mosquito and black-fly bites and it’d almost disappear behind my swollen cheeks.

  The next person I saw on it was a girl. She was perched on the bow, staring as fixedly out before her as a figurehead. She had long, straight black hair and was wearing a white sweater. At first the only thing that appeared to be moving was the smoke coming from the tip of the cigarette she was holding. And then she got up suddenly and kicked the side of the cabin. Then she went around to the other side and gave that a kick too, as though she was angry at the boat for not moving. Then she sat back down on the bow. After a minute or so she lifted her hand up and slowly unfurled her middle finger in my direction. She was looking less and less like a figurehead.

  ‘Jesus H Christ. Haven’t you got anything better to do than stare at me?’ she shouted.

  The cattails by the culvert must have thinned out over the winter.

  Wannigans

  The next time I saw her I was fishing for pike from the shore of Wannigan Bay. It was the bay along from ours. You could walk to it along the tracks, which looped around the edges of its sickle-shaped shoreline. Most of this shore was sandy and this part of the bay was filled with weed beds and lily pads. On its further side it became rockier, the last curve of the sickle ending in a granite cliff.

  It was one of my favourite places. There was something lulling, almost hypnotic, about fishing there. On sunny days like this one I’d fix my eyes on the water until eventually they accustomed themselves to the glittering of the light on the surface and the country below became visible – the stems of the lilies, the silver darting of shiners, the occasional bubbles escaping up from the dark murk of drowned leaf-litter to re-join the air. It was as though, if I waited long enough, the slowed rhythms and movements of this country would become as familiar to me as the one I must stand and breathe in. When I did see a pike I’d often not cast at all, but remain there without moving, watching it, trying somehow to match its stillness with my own. But it never quite worked. There is no way to out-pike a pike. Its stillness is prehistoric: it can wait for eons and eras, while you are stuck with minutes and hours.

  ‘I guess staring really is your thing,’ I heard a voice behind me say. It was the girl. She was scrambling down the embankment from the tracks.

  ‘I’m fishing,’ I said defensively. ‘For pike,’ I pointlessly added.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If staring is fishing, then you’re fishing.’

  I didn’t reply. She made her way along the shore and stood beside me. The light winked off the now opaque surface of the water. The other country had vanished.

  ‘Eva,’ she said. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  ‘I’m Zachary Taylor,’ I said. I could feel a crowded, tensing sensation on the right side of my forehead, which I got sometimes when I had to speak to someone I didn’t know (which wasn’t very often at Sitting Down Lake – or Crooked River for that matter). ‘But people mostly call me Zack.’

  Eva was wearing a faded blue sweatshirt with the letter Q on it and began plucking at the already frayed edges of the cuffs. Then she started scratching the side of her neck. There was a patch of skin just below her ear that was pink and raw looking, but I was careful not to examine it too closely in case she caught me at it and accused me of staring again. Her hair, I noticed, was brown this time, and shorter, and curly. I supposed she must have had it cut and dyed. Or else I’d not remembered it properly from before

  ‘You want one of these?’ she asked, offering me a cigarette from a green box with Export A written on it.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘They call this brand green death,’ she said. ‘Which is kind of funny, don’t you think?’

&n
bsp; ‘Why?’

  ‘You know, because green is supposed to be a healthy colour.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘It’d be like a piece of broccoli killing you. Or being run over by a can of spinach. Or murdered by the Jolly Green Giant.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Eva took a long pull on her cigarette and as she exhaled looked around the bay.

  ‘So, what’s with the wrecks, Zachary Taylor?’

  About fifty yards further down the shore from us were the beached remains of two boats, the last remnants of an abandoned logging camp. Eva started walking towards them and, without thinking, I found myself following her.

  ‘They’re called wannigans,’ I informed the back of her head.

  ‘What-i-gans?’

  I couldn’t blame her for asking. When I’d first heard them called that it’d sounded like the name of some goofily lumbering and extinct animal (and indeed the word itself has, to my knowledge, become sadly almost extinct these days).

  ‘Wannigans.’

  ‘What did they use them for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. And I didn’t, not really. Somebody had once told me they’d used them for hauling the bodies of drowned lumberjacks out of the lake, but I wasn’t sure if that was true. It probably wasn’t. And besides, ever since I’d discovered my fear of the drop-off I’d consigned it to the list of things I tried not to think too much about.

  ‘They’re perfect,’ she said, running a hand over the bow of the nearest one.

  They were curious enough – with their grey, rotting timbers and collapsed cabins and the intricate bulk of their rusted engines – but I’d never thought of them as perfect before. Mr Haney from Crooked River Museum had come out to look at them once. ‘Too dilapidated,’ he’d said.

  ‘Even for a museum?’ my father had said.

  ‘Even for a museum,’ Mr Haney had said.

  Eva took a Polaroid camera out her back pocket and started taking pictures of them.

  ‘How long have you lived out here?’ she asked from behind her camera.

  ‘A few years.’

  ‘What do you think about my crazy uncle’s crazy boat?’

  ‘It’s pretty big.’

  ‘It’s from Nova Scotia. I went there on holiday once. What about you?’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’ My father and I didn’t go on holidays. We hadn’t been on one since my mother died. ‘But I’d like to,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see the ocean.’

  ‘Some fishermen caught a great white shark in their nets, right off the coast from where we were staying,’ Eva said, running her hand along the wood again. ‘They brought it back to the jetty and cut out its teeth and hung it up by its tail. When I went to touch its fin its skin scraped my fingers like sandpaper. My dad said, ‘Good thing you didn’t shake hands with it in the ocean.’

  ‘Are you here on holiday?’ I asked.

  ‘God no,’ she said, without taking her eye from the camera lens. ‘I’m here because they kicked me out of the last place I lived.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m used to it. They kicked me out of the last three places I lived. Jesus, they must’ve been getting desperate to send me here to live with Lamar.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Children’s Aid people. They never let me live with him before – even when he asked them to let me. The funny thing is, after next month I’ll be old enough to live anywhere I want.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they let you stay with him?’

  ‘I guess because they thought he was crazy.’

  But I’d never thought Lamar was crazy. He was just a quiet, private, rather melancholy, man. There was nothing crazy about that. I lived with one myself.

  Eva stopped talking and started blowing on one of the photos she’d taken. ‘Look,’ she said, passing it to me and going to sit on the remains of the bow. She dangled her feet over the edge and started drumming the old boards energetically with her heels. There were holes in the knees of her jeans.

  In the photo the wannigans lay exposed in a bright wash of sunlight. It made them appear oddly buoyant, as though they were hovering a few inches off the sand. It reminded me of something else I’d heard about them: that there’d been two others just like these, and how one night a phantom crew had launched them onto the waters of the lake, never to return. My mother had told me this story. She’d been fond of ghost stories. She’d been fond of the wannigans too and had often brought me here. She’d sit on the sand and look at them while I sat beside her and tried to see beneath the surface of the water.

  ‘That shark,’ Eva said, jumping off the bow, ‘it must have been swimming right off the beach where we hung out. It must have been doing that every day we were there.’

  ‘I guess it must have,’ I said.

  She took a couple more photos and then we headed back along the tracks together. ‘Are there more things like that around here?’ she asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know, left behind things – wrecks and ruins and stuff.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Lots.’

  ‘Will you show them to me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m working tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got a weekend job.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Trapping leeches.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ she said. ‘That’s your job? Seriously?’

  ‘And minnows too sometimes,’ I added, as if this made it more serious.

  At this point we were passing the remains of Mrs Molson’s house. There wasn’t much left of it, only a few charred boards and timbers. Beyond it the Burn made its bare and blackened way through the bush.

  ‘And what happened here?’ Eva asked, getting out her camera. ‘A meteorite? An invasion of leeches?’

  A few years before a forest fire had passed a kilometre to the north-east of the lake and, almost as a malicious afterthought – or so it seemed – had reached out a thin, crooked finger and hooked Mrs Molson’s house clean out of existence, leaving the rest of us untouched. I remembered watching the smoke on the horizon that day, and my father prowling restlessly around, nervously throwing handfuls of dirt into the air to check the direction of the wind. Three times he went over to persuade Mrs Molson to come and join us on our dock, where we had our canoe ready to escape in. But she was a stubborn woman. ‘The wind is from the south,’ she kept saying. ‘We’re safe as houses here.’ It was an unfortunate choice of phrase. The fourth time my father went over there was hardly any house left. Mrs Molson was standing beside the tracks, holding an old clock and shaking her head in disbelief. ‘But it’s from the south,’ she’d kept saying, as if the universe would suddenly acknowledge its mistake. But it never did. The thin, crooked finger of the Burn – which terminated almost exactly in the charred remains of her house, as though it were pointing to them – smouldered for days afterwards, reigniting intermittently into little flames. Twenty feet on either side of it the grass hadn’t even been singed. The fire hadn’t crossed over the tracks at all. Mrs Molson and her clock went to live with a niece in Alberta. We never saw either of them again.

  After I’d finished telling her this we turned back and walked as far as the culvert. On one side of it we could see Lamar standing on the deck of his Cape Islander, holding a fishing rod out in front of him as though it were a staff (an unusually assertive gesture for Lamar, making it look as if he were trying to turn back some invisible tide). On the other side of it the treed horizon gently swelled and dipped, like the belly of a giant man asleep and snoring beside a puddle.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Eva said, looking from me to Lamar and then upwards at the sky, as though she really were asking him. ‘Where the fuck am I?’

  Swimming

  Back at our cabin I found my father sitting hunched over on the kitchen floor, attempting to ba
lance a glob of peanut butter over an elaborate contraption involving a plastic bucket and some kind of tiny ladder. It was his latest version of a humane mousetrap. He could never bring himself to kill them, and each summer would try to perfect some new contrivance for capturing them alive. He was a tall, thin man whose limbs hung as long and awkwardly from his body as Abraham Lincoln’s, and as he fiddled over his trap his elbows jutted out at odd and unpredictable angles. He looked like a praying mantis trying to split an atom.

  ‘Did you see Lamar’s boat yet?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw the front half, on the truck,’ he said.

  ‘They put them together,’ I said. ‘It’s sitting in the creek now.’

  ‘Isn’t that something,’ he said, standing up. His wispy, cow-licked brown hair almost touched the chipboard ceiling. Through the thick, round lenses of his glasses his eyes had the slightly surprised and befuddled expression they habitually had, as though he were a sleepwalker recently woken, in a place he only vaguely remembered.

  I hesitated for a moment (there were subjects my father and I were careful not to bring up with each other, or approach too closely) before telling him about meeting Eva.

  ‘Eva,’ he said. ‘You mean Eva Spiller?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You mean Lamar’s brother’s girl?’

  ‘That’s what she said – that Lamar was her uncle.’

  My father had moved over to the cupboard and started taking the dishes out of it. He began wiping them clean, one by one, even though they were already clean; a sure sign he was thinking about something he didn’t want to think about, and certainly didn’t want to talk about. After he’d finished with the plates and started on the cups I left him to it.

  Later on in the day, as the sun began to dip into the west, my father and I sat down together on the screened porch and watched Mrs Schneider swimming out towards the two small islands in the centre of the bay. We did this sometimes, although it was never planned or consciously synchronized. We’d just drift into the room at the same time, as though by chance.